Mahalia Jackson

Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans on the twenty-sixth of October 1911, the third of six children of a preacher-stevedore father and a maid-laundress mother. She sang in the Mount Moriah Baptist Church choir from age four and migrated to Chicago at sixteen, where she joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir under the direction of Thomas A. Dorsey — the gospel composer who would become her musical mentor and frequent accompanist.

She refused throughout her career to record secular music. The line she drew was theological and unwavering: she would sing the songs of God but not the songs of human entertainment. Her 1947 recording of "Move On Up a Little Higher" sold over eight million copies — the most commercially successful gospel recording of the twentieth century. Subsequent recordings ("In the Upper Room," "How I Got Over," "Trouble of the World") established her as the principal gospel singer of the post-war American religious imagination.

She was a personal friend and political ally of Martin Luther King Jr. — also placed in this archive — and accompanied him on multiple civil-rights tours through the late 1950s and 1960s. On the twenty-eighth of August 1963, she sang "I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned" at the March on Washington immediately before King delivered the address that became "I Have a Dream." When King paused in his prepared remarks halfway through, Jackson called from her seat on the platform: "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" — the prompt that occasioned the speech's most-cited section.

She sang at King's funeral five years later, on the ninth of April 1968.

She died of heart failure in Evergreen Park, Illinois, on the twenty-seventh of January 1972, age sixty.

She is honored here as the Queen of Gospel, whose voice prompted "I Have a Dream."